Groove tube: sixies television and the youth rebellion 9780822326564, 9780822380085, 9780822326458

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Groove Tube

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\ The Silent Majority “

Adult America zoned out before Tv images of war. An East Village Other comic of older-generation cluelessness.

youth of America. Adults, however, seemed to have escaped its mindwarping capabilities. Agnew, in an observation that suggested more about the validity of the generation gap than he may have intended, noted: “The adult who matured intellectually and went to work be-

fore television became such a pervasive presence in the home may still be able to take his prime-time Tv shows as he does his movies— as a form of entertainment and escapism from the humdrum of daily life.”’° The vice president apparently missed the fact that the disaffected young people of the period were rebelling against everything that represented the humdrum of daily life within the dominant so- _ cial order. Frequent cartoon representations of adult America appearing in the “comix” of underground newspapers depicted them zoned out in front of a television set. The image of a balding, beer-bellied suburban male sprawling before a television that spewed forth images

of mayhem became almost iconic of the older, uncomprehending generation. This brings us to an interesting paradox. As I have tried to show, oung people aligned with the youth movement, as well as alarmed adults, used the perceived link between television and its first genera-

young people alg y

48 Groove Tube tion of young viewers to explain the current state of the Tv generation. On the other hand, this generation had by this point abandoned the medium to a considerable extent as a major source of information and entertainment. (Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were notable exceptions.) Harlan Ellison, noted science fiction writer and regular Tv critic for the Los Angeles underground paper the L.A. Free Press, explained the situation this way: Walking down the streets these days and nights are members of the Television Generation. Kids who were born with Tv, were babysat by TV, were weaned on TV, dug Tv and finally rejected Tv. . . . But their parents, the older folks, the ones who brought the world down whatever road it is that’s put us in this place at this time—they

sit and watch situation comedies. Does this tell us something? . . . The mass is living in a fairyland where occasionally a gripe or discouraging word is heard. . . . The mass sits and sucks its thumb and watches Lucy and Doris and Granny Clampett and the world burns around them.”°

The kids had rejected the content of television, leaving it and its irrelevant programming to their elders. Like teenagers and young adults of previous and succeeding generations, they watched less television than any other age group. For members of the student protest movement or the hippie counterculture, art films and rock music were the preeminent arenas of cultural consumption. Any selfrespecting head or campus politico would be looked at askance were she or he to exhibit a too-hardy interest in the products of the Vast

Wasteland. Hip and activist young people rejected television as a commercial, network-dominated industry hopelessly corrupted by the values of the establishment. The censorship and heavy-handed cancellation of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the only network

program to succeed in engaging these young people, provided tangible evidence of the medium’s corruption.”

Groove Tube: Trip Toys and Guerrilla Video The “message” of the medium may have been too unhip and too corrupted with the discourses of the established social and political order

for young people to engage willingly with its network-dominated

The Television Generation 49 form to any great degree. The technology of television was another matter. As a stroboscopic aid to enhance an altered state of consciousness, contentless television was frequently celebrated within the hip community. At the same time, the development of low-cost, massmarketed, portable video equipment allowed counterculture types, as well as politicos, to proclaim that the movement would finally be

in a position to create its own (revolutionary) video content, bypassing establishment channels of distribution and control. Thus, as spectators, heads and freaks could use the tube for some psychedelic, subversive fun. As putative producers, “video guerrillas” envisioned using the medium for political organizing, consciousness raising, and community building. Robert Roberts rhapsodized in the East Village Other about television’s “millions of black and white dots” and their perpetual electronic rearrangements into patterns and images. This view of the medium eradicated content (and implicitly the ideological interpel-

lations that went with it), allowing for a free play of video signifiers, unanchored by any final meaning or signification. D. A. Latimer,

in the East Village Other, proclaimed television “the most potent consciousness-altering force in history” and, referencing McLuhan, argued that “any head who has watched eight hours of tv while stoned will bear [McLuhan] out: television is Cool, it involves the viewer on every level of consciousness; from verbal to nonverbal sensory conduits, visual and aural.”’* Television as television, therefore,

could be the ultimate trip toy. The East Village Other, reprinting a piece from the hippie-oriented San Francisco Oracle, instructed readers on proper freaked-out use of

their television sets. The writer argued that through his readings of

McLuhan he had discovered the meditational uses of television. To turn the set into a meditation device, one first had to eradicate the surfeit of content transmitted by the television industry. Once that was accomplished, the viewer would be able to perceive the stroboscopic nature of the medium and its mandala-like patterns so familiar to psychedelic substance users. He then provided concrete instructions:

In a darkened room, turn on your Tv set. Find a full channel. Adjust the brightness control all the way to bright (to the right). Adjust the contrast control (to the left). Adjust the vertical hold and verti-

50 Groove Tube cal linearity controls all the way to the left or right. Tune the channel selector to an empty channel. Readjust for maximum brightness as necessary — maximum retinal color results from maximum bombardment of the retina. Concentrate on sending your meditations out from your ashram to mine. Thank you. “We now return control of your TV set to you.””

This detailed strategy to eradicate content in favor of foregrounding the visual components of the medium certainly seemed to indicate a rejection of television programming as information and entertainment. The offerings of the broadcast networks were what got in

the way of a useful engagement with the formal properties of the medium. Tripped-out viewers’ abilities to play with, distort, readjust

and finally deny broadcasters their power to impose their content suggests a knowing refusal to be delivered up to the preferred viewing techniques of the medium. A reporter for TV Guide, exploring the television habits of the hip residents of the Haight-Ashbury, found similar practices. In an interview with Ed Sanders— poet, musician, and member of the band The Fugs—this “spokesman” for the community talked about watching Gunsmoke with the sound off and a Beatles or Fugs record playing. Sanders called it “free mixed media.” Poster artist Peter Max concurred that this was the proper way to watch television. “You've got yourself a self-produced show. It’s grand. The visual sense is pleased by the screen, the aural by the records, the physical by the couch or

whatever you're on, while the taste buds are satisfied by whatever youre smoking.” *° By turning Tv into a “groove tube,” Sanders and Max were suggesting empowering ways by which hip youth could use the medium for their own pleasures. As children of McLuhan, Haight-Ashbury’s young would predictably use it in a fashion that turned the technology into an extension of their psychedelically enhanced perceptual senses.

This was only a first step in seizing control of the medium. As EVO’s D. A. Latimer pointed out, television was a “powerful psychedelic force,” “emphatically a head gimmick, all of the best features of strobes and lights and hallucinations in one box.” Television was also a force with a “prediliction [sic] for mind-fucking”; therefore, the psychedelic community needed to use it for more humanityserving ends.”

The Television Generation 51 Members of the hip community attempted such a project with an early venture called “Channel One.” Created by Ken Shapiro and Lane Sarasohn, Channel One was a video theater and “psychedelic shrine”

set up in the Lower East Side in 1967. The theater housed a number of black-and-white televisions and seating for about sixty, mimicking a theater-in-the-round set up. The environment was supposed to suggest the comforts of one’s own living room. Shapiro and Sarasohn created short production pieces directly targeting a counterculture audience. “We concentrate on humor, psychedelic satire,” Shapiro explained in Latimer’s EVO piece. “The heads are a gorgeous subculture, with their own language, their own jokes—and since so little of it can be broadcast over regular media, drugs and sex and such, it gives us a whole world of totally new material to work with. We like

to think we're providing heads with their own css.” The potential for creating alternative video productions outside the dominant network media channels blossomed in 1968 with the introduction of portable half-inch video recording equipment into the U.S. market. The affordable Sony Portapak helped create a video

art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. One branch of this movement flowered amid the high-culture art world of galleries, museums, performance art, and “happenings” and received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The other branch, without foundation money, blossomed amid countercultural and student politico groupings.” Beginning in 1969 and continuing into the new decade, the underground press featured numerous articles rhapsodizing about the revolutionary possibilities of grassroots video production. Videotape as a technological tool would transform the social order, ushering in an era of true participatory democracy through “feedback” and “pro-

cess.” Video collectives began forming around the country with names like “Video Freex,” “Video Free America,’ “Global Village,” “Ant Farm,” “Raindance,” and others. Michael Shamberg, a founder of Raindance, found himself in the paradoxical position of having written the video revolutionaries’ bible, Guerrilla Television, which

was both theoretical tract and how-to manual, but having published it through the css subsidiary Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. In 1969 some CBS executives, including network vice president Michael

Dann, exhibited a quickly aborted interest in the productions of the video guerrillas. The network provided Video Freex with a

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$60,000 budget to produce some experimental programming for the network. At a public presentation in a Greenwich Village loft “stuffed with oodles of sound and video equipment,” the css brass encountered what EVO’s Allan Katzman described as “committed chaos.” Rather than taped programming filled with “information and entertainment,’ the executives got “spontaneity and fun,” along with a complete disregard for standards of “professionalism.” Dann mumbled a “rather apologetic and tolerant thank you speech,’ and the network representatives beat a hasty retreat. The incident merely reinforced to the attendant freaks and Freex

that their approach to the medium was antithetical to that of network television. In Guerrilla Television Shamberg warned, “It is the very structure and context of broadcast tv which are co-opting. Instead of politicizing people with mass-tv, Guerrilla Television seeks

to media-ize people against it.” Attempting to use the channels of network television could only be counterproductive, resulting in _

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The Television Generation 53 video guerrillas getting caught in the hegemonic signifying webs of institutional power. Shamberg went on: When I first began working in alternative television I predicted that about a year later we would have a chance to air some of our tape, but only after Tv labeled it something like “Crazy Experimental Far-Out Videotape Makers” so that somehow it would [be] set apart from broadcast-tv instead of posing a real challenge to its structure. Sure enough, eighteen months after I said that, we were asked to contribute tape to a show called “The Television Revolution.” ”

As guerrillas, underground video politicos had to avoid and evade the dominant institutions and their strategic ability to label and, thereby, capture. Foreshadowing the theorizing of Michel de Certeau on the

tactics used by the weak to negotiate imposed systems, Shamberg warned his fellow video guerrillas: “It’s impossible to vary your tactics each time, which is classic guerrilla strategy, if the people you must work with have pigeon holed you in a pre-determined category. The legitimacy you need to build a base of community and economic support may be unattainable if an alien press has already manufactured your image. The moment you surrender control of your media image, youre captured” (33). The movement’s video makers ended up cultivating a thoroughly distrustful and suspicious relationship to network television. Network broadcasters shared this antagonism and refused to show independent video pieces, typically on aesthetic, political, and technological grounds. William Boddy notes that the exclusion from the airwaves helped to “unite diverse independent producers in common marginality, creating a surprisingly close-knit community which took up the tasks not only of production, but also of distribution, exhibition, critical exegesis and publicity of the new work.” Patricia Mellencamp emphasizes the importance of decentralized systems of distribution and exhibition to the underground video movement. Process was privileged over product. The video collective Ant Farm was emblematic of the approach. A kind of communal family, Ant Farm comprised environmental activists, artists, builders, and actors, along with “university trained media freaks and hippies

interested in balancing the environment by total transformation of existing social and economic systems.” *’ Emphatically nonhierarchi-

54 Groove Tube cal, and devoted to collective work methods, the group used psychedelic drugs to unleash creative energies. Ant Farm, like a number of

other video collectives, took its show on the road, touring university campuses in a video-rigged van, which Mellencamp compares to the early Soviet agitprop trains that toured postrevolutionary Russia attempting to educate the peasant masses in communist ideas and principles. “Like the Soviets,” Mellencamp notes, “but without Marx, projects [like Ant Farm] encouraged audiences to participate in productions, as well as preaching the new visions of society” (53). Ant Farm traveled the campus circuit in a “customized media van with antennae, silver dome, Tv window, inflatable shower stall, kitchen, ice, inflatable shelter for five, solar water heater, portapak and video playback system.” **

Both media historian William Boddy and theorist Patricia Mellen-

camp point out the prevalence of video utopianism among practitioners of guerrilla television. Mellencamp notes the technological determinism that animated the video collectives. As followers of McLuhan, whose media theories were wholly instrumentalist in approach, this should come as no surprise. Mellencamp explains video activists’ idealism: ““Video’ would bring global salvation via access, circumventing institutions and going directly to individuals of conscience — the people” (53).

“Feedback” was the key. Network television provided unidirectional, one-way, hegemonic communication from the top down. Alternative television was two-way, easily accessible, and worked from the bottom up. An article in the Great Speckled Bird heralded the inauguration of the Atlanta Video Collective, a group of people who had scraped together some video equipment and wanted to get more people together, along with ideas, equipment, money, projects to tape, and places to exhibit the tapes. Articulating a utopian vision

| of the transformative possibilities of feedback, the article proclaimed: “Video tape is a start in the process of turning channels 2/5/11/17/43

upside down, but, like tv didn’t turn out to be little movies in the home, video tape isn’t just cheap, accessible tv. The difference is feedback; to see, hear, experience people (and ourselves) in struggle (life,

play, revolution) and know that you have some chance of affecting what will be in the next cycle (video feedback). . . . [Video feedback] can be part of the liberation struggle; from sexism, racism, and imperialism.” *”

The Television Generation 55 Many commentators emphasized the inherently revolutionary quality of video feedback, yet these same commentators tended to fall back on visions of guerrilla video as a tool in fostering participatory democracy. This concept, a cornerstone of the early New Left and Students for a Democratic Society, had by the close of the decade and the early 1970s been dismissed by many of the more radical revolutionists within student politico circles as fundamentally liberal and incompatible with revolutionary vangardism. Many of the video guerrillas mouthed the revolutionism of the Weathermen yet in their writings kept slipping back into less apocalyptic rhetoric. An article in San Francisco’s Good Times first heralded videotape as “a new phase

in the revolutionary process” for the Tv generation, who were described as “the revolutionary people.” Yet later in the piece the author asserted that video recorders and tape would make possible true democratic participation and that feedback would lead to the return of the town meeting of ancient Greek democracies.” Other commentators in the underground press assumed, with euphoric abandon, that the corporate colossus of mass media, along with the dominant social and political order, could be easily felled by the new technology. An East Village Other writer enthused: “Count to three and sHAZAM, society will be transformed—the establishment communications network will have been bypassed.””’ Cable television also held out the promise of transforming the social order along decentralized, democratic lines. In a page-one story in 1971 the Los Angeles Free Press asserted the potential of community access cable allowing for cheap production by local groups and organizations. The proliferation of channels would give alternative, movement-oriented video collectives and political groups access to the airwaves, bypassing network dominance and allowing for a democratization of television. The article noted that because cable franchising was under the jurisdiction of local governments and because few cities had yet been cabled, it would be easier for local groups to exert pressure on the proposed franchises. Furthermore, if we force cable operators to install systems now that are technologically capable of meeting community needs, we can later go on to create a TV that will tear down the walls that the media barons build to keep out the dispossessed, the thoughtful, the angered. Cable tv per se is not revolutionary, but real popular control of in-

56 Groove Tube formation is. Until we have the power to define our reality, we will never escape or destroy the image of reality created by the massive communications industry. Cable power to the people! ”

These video visionaries may have been a bit naive about the potentials of technology as technology to usher in fundamental social and political change. They were not at all naive, however, about the institutional powers arrayed against their projects of pluralizing mass disseminated televisual discourse. Over and over again these members of the television generation pointed out how the oligopolistic structure of network television limited diversity of expression and how the capitalist and corporate nature of the network system distorted and silenced the counterhegemonic discourses and actions of movement activists. In the 1970s cable entrepreneurs appropriated aspects of video guerrilla rhetoric about democratizing the medium and seizing control away from network behemoths. Cable, they ballyhooed, would be interactive and two-way. More recently, of course, similar rhetoric has been used by Internet providers. Boddy observes: The rhetorical similarities between the technological visions of some video guerrillas and the entrepreneurs of the booming cable industry in the 1970s seem disquieting in retrospect. The wishful thinking about the autonomy of technology and the refusal of history and politics among independent video makers may have inadvertently enlisted them as the avant garde for an (un)reconstructed communications industry only too happy to lead a “media revolution” which would leave existing power relations untouched.”””

Video guerrillas seemed to have assumed that by practicing their televisual counterpolitics outside the institutions of network television and by using two-way, feedback approaches this would somehow be enough to, “sHAzAM!,” transform the dominant social order. Of course, it didn’t happen. But on the other hand, the fact that the emergent cable industry felt a need to mobilize countercultural discourse in its appeals to potential subscribers suggests some form of negotiation with those positions on the part of the communications industry. Cable franchisers were forced to include community access stations as part of their packages. Certainly, these channels and their programming would never live up to the utopian visions of change

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